MacNN Rating:

Price: $39.95 US

The Good

The Bad

Editing tools are limited. Photos inside of frames are treated as one object. Cropping is not very precise.

Scrapbooking remains a popular hobby with artisans numbering in the millions. In its most simple terms, scrapbooking is using your photographs with frames, ornaments, keepsakes, and anything else that isn't nailed down, to create an interesting physical photo album-type page for display in a book or by itself. The hobby has expanded far beyond simple photo collage pages into patterns on the web for ornaments, gifts, photo cubes, origami-like paper folding, and anything else you can imagine. An Internet search now shows more than 34 million links to sites that mention scrapbooking.

Digital Scrapbooking

iRemember is a Macintosh only digital scrapbooking software available for Mac OS X only. This very simple page layout software includes over 15,000 pieces of art to help create a page, such as background textures, borders, corners, brads, buttons, ribbons, and tags. In addition to over 3,000 clip art images to help liven up your photo page.

The page size options range from normal print paper to scrap book specialty sizes from 3 1/2" x 2 5/8" up to the tradition 12" x 12" page. When the program launches, choosing your page size is the first dialog you see. Next, a simple blank graph paper-like page appears in which you can draw, drag and drop photos, backgrounds and other images, or write.

Tool Bar

The tool bar contains nine simple tools: An Arrow to reposition, Hand Tool Rectangle shape, Oval shape, Other shape, Line, Text, Rubber Stamp to duplicate objects, and a Magnifier or Zoom Tool. You use the shapes in conjunctions with the Inspector to add borders, colors, choose a blur, angle, or offset, resize, fill, scale, rotate or change the opacity of any image. Tool tips help the novice, along with two tutorials available from the Help menu in addition to the normal help screens.

iRemember Tools

Simplicity is the key to the design of iRemember, but it is also its downfall. If you have ever used any photo editing software, the tools in iRemember seem clumsy. When you place a picture in a shape object, you cannot click and drag to resize it, you must use the Inspector's Scale slider. You can click and drag the shape though. If you want to change the shape, there is no cut and paste for each object, because they act as one.

Limited Editing

I've not created many scrapbook pages, but my preference is to use masks and interesting edges to highlight pictures, but these options are not available in iRemember. While the Leopard-updated program works well, and does all that it says in its marketing, I think it is a limited program. The tools are very basic, as is the editing available. The way the software is written does not allow the kinds of editing you expect, such as normal cropping or pasting graphics on top of other graphics. Even with the thousands of pieces of clip art, I could not find suitable graphics to use for the soccer pages I wanted to create. On the plus side, you can always use your own graphics or public domain graphics found on the web.

Ilene's iRemember Soccer Page

While my sample page is not very elegant, it shows off the basic elements in iRemember and how you can use it to create your digital or printed scrapbook pages. To its credit, it is priced reasonably, and the price has been dropped since the previous version, plus it is available at many retail stores. You can download a 15-day trial from the site. The update from iRemember 1.x to 2.x is only $9.95.